Changing the Mind of War

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, March/April 2003
By Kate Maloy

Illustration by Katherine Streeter

"The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink."
—J. Glenn Gray

Will Durant once calculated that in all of recorded history only twenty-nine years have been free of any war in any country. Human beings are in the habit of war. It is so deeply a part of our collective consciousness — our worldview — that we cannot envision a world without it. We say war is inevitable; we say it arises from an ungovernable, unchangeable part of human nature.

Categorically transforming a worldview, especially one that is held by virtually all the world, takes either a cataclysm or a very long time. We can afford neither, for a cataclysm could spell the end of the world, and, given the possibility that the war we face right now could run quickly out of control, the time we have left in which to avert a cataclysm may be very short.

It is easy, but dangerous, to feel powerless and afraid in times like these, when war comes without serious Congressional debate, amid the erosion of civil rights, in defiance of international law and despite the opposition of millions. The best antidote to powerlessness is action, and often the way to ignite action, odd as it may sound, is first to read about the very thing we fear. Reading can calm and clear the mind.

Reading also calls upon every power of reason, imagination and emotion; it integrates. War, on the other hand, divides. It can't even exist until heart is split from mind and neighbor from neighbor. Those who plan and wage war must be divided both outwardly, against an enemy, and inwardly, against aspects of their own nature.

I have recently read, or reread, a handful of books that explore the way war disintegrates the human psyche. Three of these volumes form a fictional trilogy by the British author Pat Barker; the fourth is a book of essays by the late Columbia University philosopher J. Glenn Gray. Barker's novels — Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road — are about World War I. Gray's essays, collected in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, derive from his experiences as an intelligence officer in World War II. I first read his reflections thirty years ago and still count them a major influence on my thinking. In today's dangerously unsettled atmosphere, I have found it worthwhile to pay attention to Gray again and to Barker for the first time.

The two authors are very different. One writes fiction, the other nonfiction. One writes about the First World War, the other about the Second. One is female, the other male. One has never been to war, the other has seen combat up close. Yet they describe similar phenomena, and they reach the same conclusion — one implicitly, the other openly.

In one essay, Gray quotes from his wartime journal: "To be a soldier! That is at best to be something less than a man." Further on in that piece, from his perspective years later, he adds: "Man as warrior is only partly a man, yet … this aspect of him is capable of transforming the whole. When given free play, it is able to subordinate other aspects of the personality, repress habits of mind, and make the soldier as fighter a different kind of creature from the former worker, farmer, or clerk." The question is whether the worker, farmer or clerk can ever recover from the transformation, whether the subordinated parts can survive the experience of war, especially in a society that prepares for the next war even when it is purportedly at peace.

Gray is no ideologue. He examines war honestly, acknowledges its complexity and spends many pages talking about its open and hidden attractions, including the bond with fellow soldiers and the "delights" of spectacle, heightened experience and destruction. Each delight, however, is purchased at the price of individual identity, conscience or reason. Each can lead a soldier into situations that reveal to him his fragmentation and force him either to resist — an order, an act, a whole war — or to lose the hope of ever inhabiting his whole self again.

Gray underwent a personal wartime disintegration into a cold acceptance of killing, and he relates disturbing incidents whose cumulative effects brought him to his own point of resistance. The moment came soon after his troops entered several liberated towns in Alsace, where they saw an unusual number of young men in the streets. These were local boys who had been forced into the German army in 1940 and had then deserted at the first opportunity. The townspeople had hidden them from the Gestapo. Now they were out in the open, celebrating and supporting the Allies. Gray's colonel, a tyrant, seized on the fact that these young men naturally had no discharge papers from the German army. Astonishingly, he declared that they were therefore prisoners of war, and he ordered Gray and a fellow intelligence officer to arrest them and ship them off to a prison camp along with captured German soldiers, their bitter enemies.

Gray and his friend ignored the order three times, even under threats of court martial and fears of disgracing their families. Gray writes, "If I did not draw the line here I would be unable to draw it anywhere. If I did not refuse to become a party to the arrest of innocent, wronged men, I could not refuse to do anything that this or any other colonel ordered."

Fortunately, when the colonel called Army Intelligence to complain about the insubordination, he reached an officer who asked why Gray and his friend had refused the order. This officer found the men's reasons compelling. He agreed that it would be unjust to arrest the Alsatians, and he instructed the colonel to let them stay with their families. Gray felt "immensely strengthened for a second possible refusal," should one become necessary. He was "convinced that the individual had his absolute rights even in the desperate struggle for survival that is modern war. And survival without integrity of conscience is worse than perishing outright ... ."

Thirty years before Gray's act of conscience, the poet and combat officer Siegfried Sassoon performed one as well, releasing a public statement against World War I. His impassioned diatribe provides the opening to Pat Barker's Regeneration. This novel, along with the others in her trilogy, foreshadows Gray in showing us that war relies absolutely upon the cracking and breaking of human personalities — the very thing that defines psychosis, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. The idea that war is both a cause and consequence of pathology plays out, in Regeneration, at Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Scotland, where the task of doctors is to treat combat-induced neuroses and hysterias. The success of treatment depends on the men's ability to remember in detail the traumas that first made them ill. The purpose of treatment is to make the afflicted soldiers well enough to be sent back to the trenches.

Barker is a historian, and many of her characters are actual historical figures — not only Sassoon, but fellow poets Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves and a doctor at Craiglockhart, the neurologist and social anthropologist William Rivers. Sassoon arrives at Craiglockhart soon after issuing his objection to the war, because the authorities wish to avoid the unwelcome publicity of punishment or a court martial. If they can portray the poet as unbalanced instead of lucidly, splendidly angry, they can eventually send him back to the war with his efforts to discredit it neutralized. In fact, although Sassoon experiences split-second hallucinations of combat, he seems healthy enough until, gradually, he does determine to return to the battlefields. In this he is not alone. Most of the shattered soldiers in Barker's novels eventually develop a strong desire to return to combat, which in a sane world would naturally disqualify them. But the world of war is not sane, nor could it function if its functionaries were well.

Barker poses the riddle of health, sanity and warfare against a backdrop of earlier peacetime work performed by William Rivers and his colleague Henry Head. Together, the two neurologists had studied the destruction and healing of physiological nerves, and their experiments echo in Rivers' wartime task of regenerating the psychic nerve of traumatized soldiers. In a historically documented experiment, Head allowed the radial nerve in his own forearm to be severed so that he and Rivers could document the stages of its regrowth. As the nerve healed, it first went through a protopathic phase characterized by agonizingly painful hypersensitivity. Later, it entered the epicritic phase, in which pain is diminished but perceptivity heightened; the nerve regains its ability to distinguish among very fine sensations. Rivers has uneasy dreams in which he recalls having to torture Head by mapping the protopathic areas surrounding the damaged nerve, locating the boundaries of extreme pain by sticking his partner's arm with pins. Rivers is also deeply anguished by the knowledge that he treats his patients only to expose them to further horrors by sending them back to battle.

The men Rivers treats in the novels are in a protopathic state when they come into his care. Their hypersensitivity manifests differently in each of them. There is Burns, who was blown into the air by a shell and landed head first in the rotting corpse of a German soldier. He woke to find his mouth and nose clogged with human flesh, and now he cannot eat. He is as skeletal as the death camp prisoners will be in the next war. The neuroses of the other soldiers at Craiglockhart similarly reflect the traumas that gave rise to them.

One of the most badly broken patients is Billy Prior, a study in psychic division throughout the trilogy. He is both a working-class bloke and an officer. He is a soldier with a smoldering hatred of the civilians whose liberties he fights for. He is a bisexual who is tender with his fiancée but defensive, edgy and frequently cold with his multiple male partners. Billy comes to Craiglockhart because he has lost his voice. It comes and goes, with much stammering, but it is not completely restored until he finally remembers standing amid shattered bodies, holding in his hand the eye of one of his men and saying, "What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper?" The memory fully unstops his own gob, but it does not heal him.

In all of these patients, Rivers aims to restore the epicritic state, the one in which alert discernment is strong, emotional pain weakened and a willingness to fight re-engaged. This is the state that sustains a soldier; it is the condition that, to use Gray's terms, represses the qualities that once characterized the worker, farmer or clerk. It is not a state of good health, merely of good function given the tasks at hand. Billy Prior sustains this state so well that his other aspects do not survive. By the second novel, The Eye in the Door, he has become a clinically split personality. By the end of the third, The Ghost Road, he finally dies in combat, having already died as a civilian, lover and friend. Not long before his final battle, he writes to Rivers, "My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it."

What are good health and sanity, then? What is an optimal state for a human being who is not called upon to kill or to risk brutal injury or death? Above all, what state of health could possibly eradicate the illness that is war?

In book two of Barker's trilogy, The Eye in the Door, Rivers considers the definition of health while sitting up late with Sassoon during his second stay at Craiglockhart. The officer-poet has sustained a light head wound, which he thinks a poor reason to be hospitalized. He is in a highly emotional state, by turns excitable, fearful and joyous. He had gone back to war expecting to deal with it as he had the first time. This time, though, he insists he was happy at the front. He explains to Rivers, "I've succeeded in cutting off the part of me that hates [the war]." Moments later, though, he adds, "I had always coped with the situation by blocking out the killing side, cutting it off…." Finally, he was brought "face to face with the fact that, no, actually there's only one person there and that person is a potential killer…." This realization made Sassoon simply want to see — to walk out of the trenches and observe the field of battle, and his enemy as well, without killing, without being a killer. Sure enough, he encountered a German soldier.

"What happened?" Rivers asks him.

"Nothing. We just looked at each other. Then he decided he ought to tell his friends. And I decided it was time to leave."

Sassoon adds, "You know, Rivers, it's no good encouraging people to know themselves and ... face up to their emotions, because out there they're better off not having any. If people are going to have to kill, they need to be brought up to expect to have to do it. They need to be trained not to care ... ." Sassoon's face shows terrible pain as he makes this pronouncement. "It's too cruel," he says, growing more agitated. He can no longer cut off any part of himself.

Rivers finally calms Sassoon into sleep, and as he sits beside the poet he notices the light falling on the hairs of Sassoon's forearm. This reminds him of some early work in which he and Head studied the pilomotor reflex, which makes the hairs on a person's body stand erect. Poetry could stimulate this reflex in Head, certain exquisite scientific hypotheses in Rivers. Rivers found it fascinating "that human beings should respond to the highest mental and spiritual achievements of their culture with the same reflex that raises the hairs on a dog's back."

The Germans call this reflex "the holy shiver." Rivers calls it "the epicritic grounded in the protopathic." He wonders why the integration of the two is so commonly regarded as a state of perfect health when, in his experience, "most of us survive by cultivating internal divisions."

Here, Rivers parts from Gray, for whom, in that later war, survival without integrity — without psychic wholeness — becomes worse than death. This has finally proved true for Sassoon as well, which is perhaps why he goes walking unprotected in a combat zone. The moment he began hating the war, he became incapable of perpetuating the internal divisions that war demands. He became whole again, however painful the process of reintegration, however agonizing the reunion of emotion and reason.

Rivers, however, continues to support the war, despite the agonies of his work with its victims. His survival, like that of any committed soldier, indeed depends on his cultivating internal divisions. This is a dreadful irony, for his work, ostensibly, is to heal exactly that fragmented condition in his patients. The truth is, if he actually accomplished this, he would end up with one Siegfried Sassoon after another, none of whom would any longer be willing to kill. The further truth is, Rivers does not heal the cracks in his patients' psyches; he merely binds them up until they no longer bleed. Rivers serves the war-god Mars, and by definition he, like his patients, can at best survive. Neither he nor they can be restored to full health and wholeness and still serve the purpose of war.

For Rivers, then, the holy shiver is but a passing frisson, like footsteps over his gravesite. For Gray and Sassoon, the shiver represents a powerful reintegration of splintered aspects of their personalities. Gray restores himself to himself by refusing to treat innocent men unjustly. Sassoon begins this same process by speaking out against a war he once supported. This doesn't mean they walk about in a permanent state of balance, experiencing the protopathic and the epicritic in equal measure, always. It does mean that each, eventually, recovers qualities in himself that were previously repressed by what Gray calls "man as warrior."

More than that, for both Gray and Sassoon, the act of resistance that begins their healing has a lasting influence. Months after Sassoon has made his antiwar statement, he finds himself unable to kill, because he can no longer "block out the killing side." His reintegration, tested by his return to combat, has made him incapable of ever being a warrior again. Similarly, a full decade after Gray has returned to civilian life, he feels compelled to remember and try to make sense out of his experiences in war. In fact, the only way he can continue inhabiting his true and complete self, the one he restored by refusing his colonel's order, is to remember.

"I am afraid to forget," he writes in the first essay in his book. "What protrudes and does not fit in our pasts rises to haunt us and make us spiritually unwell in the present. … We may become refugees in an inner sense unless we remember to some purpose. Surely the menace of new and more frightful wars is not entirely unrelated to our failure to understand those recently fought."

Rivers wants his patients to "remember to some purpose," but the purpose is further war. Gray has something else in mind, which, ultimately, is the health of people and nations alike. If a man can become whole in spite of having once disintegrated in the face of war, then countries, likewise, can heal. He writes, in his final essay, "The reason a nation that seeks to be just must abhor being hated and feared is [that] ... hate and fear are evil and damaging to our inner life ... . Nothing corrupts our soul more surely and more subtly than the consciousness of others who fear and hate us. Such is our human nature that we cannot possess power that others dread without becoming like the image of their fear and hate. To possess dread power does not corrupt us overnight; our features may remain benign for years ... ."

Gray has used his full array of human faculties to come to terms with his experience and to conclude that human beings cannot afford more war. He is utterly clear in his beliefs, no matter how unlikely it is that anyone else will act on them or that the world can be saved from its only "rational" creatures. He calls himself a "brokenhearted idealist."

Barker offers indirect evidence of her personal views on war. Readers can infer them not only through Sassoon and through Rivers' persistent self-conflict, but through the cumulative effects and final scenes of her trilogy. Without preaching or pronouncements, Barker reaches the same point that Gray reached, with the same sorrow, realizing that war must stop but fearing that it cannot. Both her hope and her sorrow are clear at the end of her trilogy, in the death of a lieutenant named Hallet.

Hallet has had half his face blown away. He has lingered unmercifully long, with a cerebral hernia pulsating through what is left of his skull. He cannot speak intelligibly, given the damage to his jaw, but he understands exactly what has happened to him. His family and sweetheart have sat, aghast, at his bedside for thirty-six hours, since he began his final decline. They are barely able to look at his appalling wounds. They are waiting for him to die, and so are the other men in the hospital ward. At last, Hallet struggles to say what seems a single word. "Shotvarfet!" he cries in agony. "Shotvarfet!" he repeats, over and over. His family cannot understand him, and they turn desperately to Rivers. At first, Rivers cannot grasp Hallet's meaning, either — but then he does:

"He's saying, 'It's not worth it.'"

Once Rivers has translated Hallet's urgent cry, the rest of the patients in the ward take it up, issuing "a buzz of protest not against the cry, but in support of it, a wordless murmur from damaged brains and drooping mouths." The injured and traumatized, who have seen and suffered combat for themselves, declare with the dying man that their sacrifices are not worth making. Hallet's own father, a lifetime soldier, insists wildly, even in his grief, "Oh, it is worth it, it is."

It is in the face of this kind of fierce insistence, and the iron intransigence of the worldview that fosters it, that Gray says, "Men will have to make someday an absolute break with their past, as dope addicts must with their habit, if war is to pass away. The problem of war ... demands an emotional reorientation of such a kind that men will thenceforth date their liberation from that day. In Biblical language, this transformation will be apocalyptic in kind, comparable to the ancient command of the Lord: Let there be light!"

If light is ever to shine, if humankind is ever to reach a universal shotvarfet moment, it will come only through acts of will and resistance like Gray's and Sassoon's — millions upon millions of such acts, all of them founded on a sudden, determined, deliberate shift in worldview, a new set of expectations and a new set of ideas about our nature. Our whole nature, not our divided, fragmented, false one. Ideas, in fact, are in themselves actions. The right ideas heal us; they change what we do by changing what we see as possible. The only way we can change the age-old idea that war is a necessary evil is to decide that the idea is false. We can best decide this by reading, thinking, reflecting, remembering — in other words, by engaging in the kinds of acts that integrate us and could thereby integrate our world.

Books in this Article:
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959) by J. Glenn Gray
Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker
The Eye in the Door (1993) by Pat Barker
The Ghost Road (1995) by Pat Barker

Talk about it: Politics & Dissent

—Kate Maloy is the author of the new novel, Every Last Cuckoo, a Book Sense Pick for January and one of More magazine's Don't Miss Books. She is a contributor to the recent anthologies For Keeps and Choice, and her essay "Winding Threads" is in the Spring 2008 issue of The Kenyon Review. She just finished reading Cheating at Canasta, and as soon as she's recovered from this encounter with perfection she'll move on to Half of a Yellow Sun.

This article was first published in The Readerville Journal print magazine, March/April 2003.